Review: The Patrick Star Show “Lost in Couch/Pat-a-thon”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Patrick journeys inside his couch to track down his remote. Then, Patrick hosts a telethon for SpongeBob’s pet snail, Gary.

Our Take:

The first episode, “Lost in Couch”, sees our host journeying to where no starfish has ever gone before: the couch. In the middle of watching cartoons, Patrick accidentally drops his remote inside the sofa. Using his tracking skills, he and his pet urchin Ouchie must track it down so he can switch off bowling. The episode satirized plenty of nature documentaries, most notably Steve Irwin’s “Crocodile Hunter” show, by having Patrick look for the “Remoto Dragon”. It’s an amusing small adventure inside the cavern-like couch filled with some goofy humor and solid callbacks to the spoofed genre.

The second episode, “Pat-a-thon”, is what you expect regarding its title. It’s a telethon hosted by none other than Patrick Star. Patrick and Squidina host a looney telethon to raise money for snails who can’t dance, primarily Gary, SpongeBob’s pet snail. They do what they can to raise some cash, including having GrandPat perform a dangerous stunt. In the end, they only managed to make negative one cent, but that doesn’t matter because Gary learned how to tap dance thanks to Sandy Cheeks’ tap spray.  

The “Pat-a-thon” episode is one of the examples of the writers showcasing some creative freedom and breaking continuity with SpongeBob SquarePants. Like Sponge on the Run and Kamp Koral, The Patrick Star Show included a younger version of Sandy Cheeks (voiced by Carolyn Lawrence) to interact with the other young versions of our favorite characters. As someone who grew up with SpongeBob first encountering Sandy in SpongeBob SquarePants, this “continuity error” still bugged me a bit, and it will surely do the same to the other SpongeBob fanatics. Aside from that, it’s a hilarious telethon that appreciated the show’s surreal silliness. The scenes that involve Squidward getting prank-called and the stop-motion segment resembling Frankenstein were my favorite highlights of the episode, primarily the latter for its animation work.

Overall, both episodes continue to take advantage of its silly concept by providing hilarious humor and fun stories that took inspiration from other television genres. Whether you’re into hunting for dangerous creatures inside the couch or telethons or both, The Patrick Star Show has plenty of that. No more and no less.